A Colo. Community Looks for Answers After Deadly Attack

School officials, police, and local leaders in Jefferson County,
Colo., worked round the clock last week trying to pick up the emotional
pieces of a community torn apart by two students with firearms and an
arsenal of explosives.

In the deadliest school shooting in the nation's history, the two
seniors at Columbine High School in suburban Denver killed 12 of their
fellow students and one teacher April 20 before taking their own lives.
More than 20 others were wounded, many of them seriously.

"We are still a little shell-shocked," Jane Goff, the president of
the Jefferson County Education Association, which represents 3,600
teachers, said late last week. "We are angry this thing happened.
Everybody wants to know why. Everybody is grieving."

Ms. Hammond assured parents that the district "is taking every step to
ensure the safety and well-being of students, staff, and parents at the
school." But, she added, "it would be very difficult to prepare for
what has happened."

The Columbine High shootings brought inevitable reminders of a
series of school slayings that shocked the country during the 1997-98
school year. A year ago last month, four students and a teacher were
killed when two boys opened fire at a middle school in Jonesboro, Ark.;
last May, two students were fatally shot and 22 were wounded at a high
school in Springfield, Ore.

And there were scattered reports last week that school authorities
in a number of states were dealing with threats of "copycat"
incidents.

Grim Scene

Jefferson County police described last week's scene at Columbine
High School as gruesome: Officers combed through bomb damage and debris
to find students' bodies in pools of blood, a teacher shot in the chest
at point-blank range, and the two teenage assailants dead in the
cafeteria after apparently turning their guns on themselves.

Police continued to investigate how 18-year-old Eric D. Harris and
17-year-old Dylan Klebold had assembled an arsenal that included at
least 30 bombs, in addition to two sawed-off 12-gauge shotguns, a 9 mm
semiautomatic rifle, and a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol that were found at
the scene. The authorities also were seeking to determine if the two
had any accomplices.

Meanwhile, the district and local health and community centers opened
their doors to the grieving and held all-day memorials in the days
after the killings. Funerals began at the end of last week, though most
were scheduled for early this week.

Kay Pride, a spokeswoman for the Jefferson County district, said
school officials have started an investigation into what actions might
have been taken to identify how troubled Mr. Harris and Mr. Klebold
were before they went on their rampage.

At a Glance:
Columbine High School

Location:

Jefferson County, Colo., a suburb of Denver

Grades:

9-12

Enrollment:

1,965

Student
Population:

90 percent white

Columbine High School was built in 1973 and
underwent a $13.4 million renovation in 1995. The school is
noted for both its academic and its athletic records. Its
students consistently score higher than state and national
norms on the SAT and ACT college-entrance exams. Columbine
has won numerous state champtionships in baseball, soccer,
and basketball.

SOURCE: Jefferson County School
District.

She said the district, which has one of the best
academic-achievement records in the state, has had few brushes with
violence and is "one of the real jewels of Colorado."

District officials planned to increase security at all schools, Ms.
Pride said, at least in the short term. Columbine High School currently
has two unarmed campus supervisors and one armed officer from the
Jefferson County sheriff's department. Although the school has a
Littleton mailing address, it is actually in an unincorporated area of
Jefferson County.

'Students Were Screaming'

Whatever the security arrangements, members of the Columbine High
community may find it difficult to return to their campus.

As much as she loves her school, Sheryl Lucas, a veteran English
teacher, said she's not eager to go back.

Recounting the day of the shootings in a telephone interview, Ms.
Lucas said she had just sat down for her $2 lunch in the cafeteria when
she heard business teacher William D. "Dave" Sanders shout to the
roughly 900 students there that an armed intruder was entering the
lunchroom.

"Sanders yelled, 'They've got a gun,' and we all went down on our
hands and knees. Nobody asked any questions. Everybody hit the ground,"
Ms. Lucas said. "Students were screaming. It was too surreal."

Mr. Sanders, 42, who was widely credited with having shepherded
numerous students to safety, was later found shot to death. He was the
only faculty member to die in the incident.

"I love teaching at this school," Ms. Lucas said, "and it just took
two lunatics to destroy so much."

Profound grief often turned into anger last week as parents and
teachers repeatedly asked why no one was able to predict--and
prevent--the tragedy.

"Where were their parents when their kids were building pipe bombs
in their own home?" said Heather Rosson, whose 9-year-old son attends
an elementary school in the district. "It scares me that parents are so
detached."

The parents of Mr. Harris and Mr. Klebold issued statements
expressing their sorrow. "Like the rest of the country, we are
struggling to understand why this happened," the Klebold family's
prepared statement said.

The portrait of the assailants that emerged in news reports last
week was of two students, ridiculed by many of their classmates, who
were part of a small clique called the "Trenchcoat Mafia." Mr. Harris
and Mr. Klebold, both from middle-class homes, reportedly shared an
animus toward student athletes and a fascination with firearms and
explosives, violence-related computer games, and Nazis. Their April 20
spree came on the 110th anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler.

Their student victims ranged from freshmen to seniors: eight boys
and four girls, nearly all of them white. One boy was African-American;
another had a Hispanic surname. About half the students had been
involved in school sports.

"I don't think people hated them," Josh Ortwein, an 18-year-old
senior, said of Mr. Klebold and Mr. Harris. "It was more of a general
dislike because they were really radical in their actions and
beliefs.

"People knew there was something kind of wrong with them," he said
in a phone interview.

Feelings of rejection and anger typically underlie the kind of
violence seen at Columbine High, experts on youth violence
say.

How Much Security?

Looking back, some staff members wondered whether the school might
have missed certain warning signs.

Ms. Lucas, the English teacher, said that both Mr. Harris and Mr.
Klebold had written stories in class "about war and killing that were
horribly, graphically violent." She said that the dean of students
tried to have the two boys reprimanded but that "no action was
taken."

"In a free society, you can't take action until they've committed
some horrific crime because they are guaranteed freedom of speech," she
said.

Weighing individual liberties against concern for safety involves a
sensitive balancing act for school leaders, some officials and experts
noted last week.

Ms. Pride, the spokeswoman for the Jefferson County schools, warned
against overreacting and relying too heavily on beefing up security. Do
you "make a high school into an armed prison camp where there are metal
detectors that make kids feel imprisoned," she said, "or do you count
on people's basic goodness and put good rules in place?"

And despite the scale of the Columbine High shootings, Vincent
Schiraldi, the director of the Washington-based Justice Policy
Institute, warned against seeing school violence as the norm.

More than 3,000 U.S. children are killed each year, he said, but few
of those deaths occur at school.

When a school shooting occurs, it gets saturation news coverage
precisely because it's so unusual, he said.

"My fear is people will start to overreact and kick kids out for
telling a joke at school about killing Barney," he said.

School health experts said a constructive way to deal with such
horrific incidents is to promote conciliation.

"Instead of talking about crime and crises, maybe we need to focus
on what we have to do to have a peaceful, harmonious experience," said
Judy Eigo, a professor of nursing at the University of Colorado in
Denver, who was aiding crisis-intervention workers last week.

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